Designing utopia. Avant-garde architecture vs. processes of modernization

Abstract

_{In the first half of the 20th century, the relations between the social revolution, the processes of modernization, and avant-garde art and architecture were very close. Piotr Juszkiewicz, analyzing the relations between modernism and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, stated that “totalitarian regimes did not reject a certain form of artistic language by default because they were interested in their utility”. “Fundamental elements of our architecture are conditioned by the social revolution”, wrote El Lissitzky. In the face of such declarations, the relations between avant-garde designers and social or Communist trends should not come as a surprise. Post-revolutionary Russia became a true test site for new movements, whereas modernist and Constructivist artists enthusiastically proceeded to build the new (better) reality. The development of industry (primarily heavy industry) was to become a driving force behind the modernist processes. Examples of industrial plants built in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union show the enormous impact exerted by modern construction and urbanism on the formation of the “new man”. Numerous products of avant-garde architecture reflected the image of the “new world” and became the transmitters of the new Soviet ideology. For the inhabitants of Ekaterinburg, Magnitogorsk, or Kharkov, modernist buildings and landscape layout formed a permanent image of the city and its concept. Urban designs, such as the “Linear City” of Ernst May in Magnitogorsk, were utopian modernist dreams executed on an enormous scale. The circumstances of their creation, followed by the times of their greatness and fall, form a portrait of the avant-garde architecture understood as a utopia, the future that never arrived.}